A few months later, still at the peak of my “new life,” the feeling that I couldn’t help my clients intensified as my façade of success crumbled. The fitness competition I had won had been an awful experience of self-abuse that made me obsessed with keeping my weight as low as possible. The new guy I’d fallen in love with was my ex-husband in a different body. My emotional life was falling apart.

On a calm day while walking home from the gym, I started having frightening thoughts. I didn’t think about ending my life; rather, something deep inside me suggested it was already over. Despite my fit and healthy body, years engaged in the fitness community, and my organic diet, I was severely depressed.

I felt I could not share my condition with anyone. After all, I was a fitness model and a “health” enthusiast. Being perceived as a strong and inspirational person was crucial to helping the people around me become “healthy.” Thus, my depression had to remain hidden.

Although I knew my clients were making positive changes in their lives because of me, I intuitively acknowledged that these were not the kinds of changes that pleased the “soul.” Pained and lonely, I trusted I would overcome depression and feel “normal” again by spending more time at the gym, coming up with new exercise routines, new healthy and delicious recipes, or buying new gym clothes. But my depression worsened until, on a sunny, beautiful day, I felt that I was dead. I couldn’t think of anything that made me feel I deserved to be alive. My past was filled with painful experiences and torturous memories, from childhood abuse, to two divorces, to unreliable friends, to dissatisfying careers. In the darkness of my own mental prison, I asked myself: “What would you do if you were still alive?”

This was the question that changed everything. Before I even thought of an answer, joy washed over me, and immediately I knew that my understanding of life had shifted. I felt like I was free from all the pain. This feeling also announced that happiness and peace had been there in my heart all along. I promised that I would listen to my heart from that day on, starting with forgiving my mother. There would also be no more preoccupation to be fit as a way to be happy. I was, and always had been, fit for joy!

This feeling was so real and strong that all I wanted to do was to share it with others. I wanted to tell everyone that no matter what happened, is happening, or will happen, that there is a path to true happiness.